The state of object-oriented user-interface (OOUI) technology today is quite depressing. I bet that you can not name one that is useful and in production. After all the years since I stopped using OS/2 and its innovative WorkPlace Shell (WPS) OOUI, there is yet to be anything like it in Linux, Mac, Unix or any other mainstream operating system. The closest we have today is the Mac OS X which is really an intuitive graphical user-interface (GUI).
The heart of the IBM OS/2's WPS is the System Object Model or SOM. SOM is an object-oriented system level object model that is similar to Microsoft' Common Object Model (COM). The key difference is that SOM supports inheritance while COM does not. So, in esseence, COM is really an API with object-oriented like features. SOM is truly object-oriented.
Back to the OOUI discussion. WPS objects had the capability to inherit from parent classes or other base classes. One clear feature of WPS that I miss in the modern GUI/OS world of today are Shadows. There currently is not similar analogy to this in KDE/GNOME, Mac OS X, or Windows.
In WPS, Shadows objects that point to other objects. They are like shortcuts in Windows except that they inherited all their properties from SOM. The one thing that is still a major annoyance with shortcuts is when you move the file or directory to which your shortcuts is pointing. The shortcut is really a static pointer to some file, directory or application. When you do this you get the invalid shortcut problem in Windows. The same scenario occurs in KDE/GNOME and Mac OS X. You would figure that this problem would be resolved by now. But that is not the case. Instead there are tools, utilities, tips, workarounds, scripts or whatever to fix this very trivial issue.
In an OOUI like WPS, Shadows inherit from SOM the File, Directory, or Application object. So when the underlying File, Directory, or Application changes, your Shadow automatically knows this through inheritance. This is very simple, intuitive, and just works.
I recently read that the motions by the OS/2 community (yeah, it still exists) to request that IBM open source OS/2 has been denied by IBM due to several licensing and intellectual property reasons. OS/2 source was developed collaboratively by IBM and Microsoft. On the other hand, SOM is an IBM technology that was developed after IBM and Microsoft split in the early 1990s. I just read a new suggestion ("Should IBM' SOM/DSOM be open sourced?") that IBM explore open sourcing SOM which would give to the world an object model that is proven and can be a foundation for future OOUIs developed using a modern open source methodology.
A move by IBM that makes SOM available would inject a stimulus into the state of user-interface innovation which appears to have stagnated in the past 10-years. In general when you look at KDE/GNOME, Mac OS X, Windows, and any of the variants used in Unix, they all pretty much do the same thing. They are some form of implementation of the WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) paradigm that Xerox PARC created in the 1970s.
I think it is time that we focus on the OOUI again. It seems to have lost its lustre so far this decade. Maybe then things will get exciting in the UI space again. If a way to tie the OOUI to the web and make it some form of OOUI that is browser based, an object-oriented web interface (OOWI) if you will, that would allow it to work on any platform! Now that would be real progress. Then we can start talking about OOWIs! Oooh weee! Wishful thinking.
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